Posts Tagged The New York Times

Even handed as the public editor almost always is, this piece by the new Public Editor at The Times comes down on the side of more rigorous investigation of the drone war, while also tending to question its legitimacy. She, and several of the comments, raise the point that if there were a Republican president leading this, there might be more press scrutiny.

The protests we all have been raising now for years are a part of creating this potential crisis of legitimacy in what the government is doing, no matter who wins the election. We need to step it up, and contribute to a creating a situation where it can’t be continued without greater consequences in losing public support.

Max Frankl, who was in the Washington bureau of the Times in 1971, talked about the intense struggle within the Times on whether to publish the Pentagon Papers. The paper’s outside lawyers were against publication, but courageous editors went ahead, making the history gripping.

The smugness of The Times’ position — “aren’t we fine to have done the right thing back then?” — was infuriating to some of us in the audience, given what they’ve done through the last 9 years in complaining about how the Bush and Obama administration have waged wars, but helping create legitimacy for them.

Dan challenged the Times on its responsibility, bringing up Wikileaks four times. “We need a lot more of that!” he said, referring to the 2010 leaks of Collateral Murder and the Afghan War Diary. “We’ll get to that,” said the Times Managing Editor. But her only comments were about how hard the Times worked to vet the Wikileaks information.

The Times risked money, and perhaps could have been shut down by the Nixon administration when it published the Papers. But Dan risked his life and a long prison term. He thought the Papers might have “only a small chance of helping” stop the war, but considered the risk worthwhile. He reminded us that he spent 22 months waiting on Congress to get the story out, his biggest “mistake.” “Timing matters.” If he had leaked what he knew in 1964 and 1965 when people in the military knew the Vietnam war was a disaster, and that the Gulf of Tonkin justification was a lie, “many deaths could have been avoided.”

Dan was very critical of the Times for sitting on the NSA spying story for a year, before printing it in late 2005. But the Times representatives mainly would not go there, except to say there’s a “great burden of conscience” in having such information and knowing whether to publish it. Dan pointed out that the burden functions to keep secrets “too well.”

We didn’t get to hear debate over the Times’ role in pushing the “official story” of the Bush regime on Iraq in 2003. So much defense of imperialist wars…and so little time.

Matthis Chiroux, Janis Karpinski, and Ray McGovern, who have all taken responsibility to end the wars and torture of the Bush regime, were in the audience. Ray stood up for the first question. He told the panel that, as of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, Iran has no nuclear weapons in production. He asked the panel what an intelligence analyst should do if the 2010 Intelligence Estimate were to be cooked in the same way the NIE on Iraq was changed in 2003, paving the way for war. Should that analyst leak the truth to The New York Times…or to Wikileaks? The implication was clear, and again, the Times did not answer.

We were all seated together, and I told those around me of World Can’t Wait’s plans to publish Crimes are Crimes – No Matter Who Does Them as a full page ad in the Times around the anniversary of the war on Afghanistan. The longest running war in U.S. history, and getting bloodier. You won’t hear it condemned by The Times.